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Sunday, 13 March 2016

In the icon before us today, we see a
penitent hermit in the desert of Judaea. There is the hill country into which
Mary the Mother of God went after the Annunciation to visit St Elizabeth, the mother
of St John the Baptist. There is purifying hyssop in the vale, blown in the wind
that is the coming of God in Person (Psalm 28.5). There is the desert river whose
flow returns, marking the turning round of our captivity, just as the Psalm
tells us (Psalm 125. 5). There are the walls of the city of Jerusalem and on a
famous outcrop of rock stands the Cross of Calvary. Looking up to the city and
the Tree that surpasses all others is the entrance to the remote cave made
into a monastery dwelling, where the hermit can fast and pray, and store up his
heavenly treasures in secret (Matthew 6.21). We recall, too the Lord’s advice
to His disciples to pray not for public attention, but for the loving intimacy
of a child with his Father in a private place (Matthew 6.6), a sanctuary for
the heart.

It is easy
for us to imagine that this kind of life of prayer and returning to God in penitence
is for experts and professional Christians, like monks, nuns and priests. But
Jesus’ remarks on how, when and where to pray were for all of us. All of us
need to find these opportunities, these moments, these words and silences, these
places and spaces, where we can stand alone before God, just as He stands facing
towards us with a heart and eyes only for us, each one of us, child to Father,
Father to child. This is what we are concentrating on today, the last of the
Sundays that herald the coming of Great Lent, the Sunday for repentance, for
seeking God’s face, for coming back to him, for asking forgiveness.

Now, one of
the criticisms that the Eastern Churches have about the Catholic Church -
especially the Latin Roman Catholic Church - is its view of sin and repentance,
forgiveness and virtue, in terms of law and duty, transgression and guilt, the mechanism of humanity’s Fall from grace and systems to repair it. Where is
the Holy Spirit, and the compassion of the love of God when the talk is of
breaking the law and observing the rules? Of course they are there in abundance
in the western Catholic tradition; Pope Francis’s proclamation of the mercy of
God, and St Margaret Mary Alacoque’s ardent devotion to the merciful and
sanctifying Sacred Heart of Jesus both attest to this. But let us for a moment follow
some thoughts on how the West’s approach looks to the East.

Saint
Augustine, a Father to the Churches of both East and West, teaches about our
standing in total need of God's grace, for no effort of our own takes us forward
without His own. From Augustine's teaching, the Catholic Church takes the view that
humanity as a whole fell from God’s grace, that this is part of humanity’s
condition and experience, and that thus only by Baptism in Christ and His sacraments
can the stain that in our nature that we have inherited be removed. The western Protestant
Reformers exaggerated this. While rightly stressing our reliance on God’s grace
and redemption for everything, John Calvin in particular went further than St
Augustine and spoke of our "total depravity" – the complete corruption of our
nature by sin, obscuring the image of God within each
person. In response, the Catholic Church stressed how the image of God within every
one of us bears the Light that the darkness cannot overwhelm (John 1.5) and remains
sovereign beyond the power of sin, to urge our free will to turn to Him and
seek His face. So we are not by nature completely wicked at all, but always
open to God’s gift of faith and the workings of His grace. The great Catholic
celebration of this insight is belief in the Immaculate Conception of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, the first of the redeemed. It sees the guilt of Adam’s
Original Sin as broken by the power of Christ’s redemption to be worked on the
Cross. By God’s choice, Mary is the first to receive this grace that makes her entirely
free from the ancestral corruption of sin. So her life is entirely open to God’s gift
of faith, and thus to the Incarnation of God the Son in her womb.

The Christian East puts it slightly
differently. Yes, Adam fell from grace but, then, “all have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23). His disobedience leaves its mark on
us, and we have inherited his tendency to sin, and our sins are our own. Yes, Our Lady, the Mother of
God, is Immaculate, without sin, and “all-glorious within” (Psalm 44.13), and this
is entirely the gift of God. But just as much a part of human individuals’
situation of being mired in our ancestors’ tendency to sin is the inclination toward a new life in
the Kingdom of God, to our true existence now, in the heights of Christ’s
resurrection.

Think of what we have sung in today’s
Troparion (of Sunday, Tone 8):

You came down from on high, O Merciful One, and accepted
three days of burial to free us from our sufferings. O Lord, You are our life
and our resurrection.

In other
words, while the Western Christian tradition appears at first sight to stress law
and obedience, the Fall, transgression and how amendment is made by redemption,
the East, including the Eastern Catholic Churches, stresses the dimension of the
liberation that is achieved by living Christ’s own risen life, by the power of
the Holy Spirit in the Kingdom of God. What is on high comes down and is buried
in the earth, so that what is earthbound rises and becomes lodged in heaven.
This is what Our Lord meant when He said in today’s Gospel, “Store up for
yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart
will be also” (Matthew 6.21). Of course, the Western Latin Catholic Church
believes this too – both East and West recall the apostle’s description of “Our
true homeland in heaven” (Philippians 3, Hebrews 11). And the East believes
that we are sinners constantly in need of making repentance, and seeking
forgiveness.As we begin
Great Lent this Monday, today is the Sunday on which we think of this repentance
and forgiveness. But it would be wrong to approach it all in terms of humanity’s
total failure, and the futility of trying to follow Christ only to see that our
footsteps will surely falter. No wonder the Protestant Reformers felt
confronted by the idea of our total wickedness and powerlessness to do anything
about it. It would be even worse to think of repentance as an exercise in
de-humanising ourselves, making ourselves abject, guilt-ridden and fearful beings before God Who has already looked upon what He has made and
pronounced it good. He took flesh from this, and we know Him as Mercy itself. Of
course we have no merits of our own and we rely on God’s power alone: our sins,
our characters, our behaviour and our attitudes are an affliction that make us
weep for shame. We have all experienced those moments when we have turned back
to God with tears of both compunction and relief. But this is not because God
has brought us to rock bottom – it is because He is raising us up.

If you look
at the Desert Father kneeling outside his room where he fasts and prays in secret,
storing up treasures in heaven where his heart is, you will see not someone who
is dismal and destroyed. Nor will you see someone going through the duties of
religion, because otherwise he is lost and hopeless. Instead, you will see a
person with arms uplifted, someone whose eyes are set upon the Cross
of Christ with hope-filled vision, an open face, a single-minded heart, and
not a craven, downcast spirit. What you see is adoration; it is love. It is joy
at being forgiven; it is the sheer sense of unworthiness at finding oneself
lifted up into the presence of God’s Kingdom and being there and nowhere else -
not because of my own efforts, but by the mercy and love of God for the sinner.
He is the Judge Who has no use for blame; he is the Justice Who wishes
everything to be put back into its true balance, restored to what He deems
to be right for each one of us, and in each one of us. Here, then, we who bear
His image within us find ourselves - called back to Him, owning our sins and
wickedness, pouring out our hearts to Him, finding His forgiveness, freed from the tribulation of this world
as a life in the next tis poured into us, to lead already now.

In the
Gospels, the word for repentance is not confession or penance, but metanoia. It means “thinking again”, or “changing
your mind”. It means not only reviewing our sinful past thoughts, words and
deeds, but embracing a completely new perspective on reality, a new outlook on
life. Metanoia is also the word we
use for the profound bows we make in our Liturgy, such as when we sing the
Thrice-Holy Hymn and make the sign of the Cross, saying, “God be merciful to
me, a sinner”. In other words, repentance is not about our actions out of guilt and
transgression, but the power of God in His holiness and on His Cross to forgive
the past and make all things new. During our Liturgy we constantly sing, “Lord,
have mercy”. This is not about our abasement in shame, unworthy as we are to
stand where we do in God’s presence. It is about our constant, repeated, never
to be forgotten and always being recalled “thinking again” - our taking on a new
perspective on reality, a fresh outlook on life. It means a life lived in the
joy of the mercy of God. It means the adoration of the sinner who places every
hope in the Cross. It means never the burden of law and duty, nor the misery of
our fall from grace, but always the treasure stored up in heaven where our
hearts truly lie.

Thus the repentance
in Great Lent upon which we now embark is the life of the Mother of God without
any stain: freedom from sin, and the liberation to enter the Kingdom as she is
filled in every part with the Holy Spirit (Proverbs 24.4 and Ephesians 3.9). It
is the complete pouring out of the heart and soul to God in love, as He pours
Himself into us in the entirety of His mercy, the entirety of “His Presence and His very Self”
(Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman, Praise to the Holiest
in the Height).

For reflection:

My God, I love Thee; not because
I hope for heaven thereby,
nor yet because who love Thee not
are lost eternally.

…

Then why, O blessed Jesus Christ,
should I not love Thee well,
not for the sake of winning heaven,
nor of escaping hell;

not with the hope of gaining aught,
nor seeking a reward;
but as Thyself hast loved me,
O ever loving Lord!

So would I love Thee, dearest Lord,
and in Thy praise will sing,
solely because Thou art my God
and my most loving King.

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Welcome to Mark Woodruff's homepage - for his writings and thinking on Social Development and Civil Society, Christian Unity, Church history and theology, various essays and addresses, and some of his music from over the years.

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